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Four discs, packed with 74 tracks -- including 16 previously unreleased rarities, about half of them live -- and a glossy 60-page book with track-specific information, details Hall & Oates' crossover appeal, longevity and somewhat unexpected resurgence in recent years.

For John Oates, turning over a new leaf meant shaving off his Freddie Mercury moustache. Oates still ain't as pretty as his taller, blonder, better-known partner, Daryl Hall of Hall & Oates, but for our money, the pint-size David Starsky doppelgänger has got to be a better sport than, say, Andrew Ridgley, the silent half of Wham! Better yet, judge for yourself via this exclusive Q&A.

More by Ben Westhoff

The watering-down of the genre is one reason R&B has been disparaged as "Rap & Bullshit" by everyone from RZA of Wu-Tang Clan to rap bloggers at Cocaine Blunts to the now-defunct music site Stylus. Another is because it's artistically moribund.

Mere hours after landing at Heathrow I found myself onstage with a friend that I have been to hell and back with, and lived to tell the tale. Axl Rose and I just happened to be in hotel rooms next to each other. Unexpected? Oh, fuck yes.

Never-quite-was is more like it, as James McMurtry, the son of famed novelist and screenwriter Larry (Lonesome Dove) McMurtry, has yet to live up to the "next big thing" status bestowed on him when he burst out of the gates with his debut.

Twenty years after the death of her friend and lover, photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, punk-rock pioneer Patti Smith has released Just Kids, her memoir of the couple's bohemian, hardly-fed days in late-'60s New York City.